But they have long been interested in bringing AI to Google products. Vic Gundotra, a former senior vice president at Google, said he gave Mr. Page a demo of a new Gmail feature around 2008. But Mr. Page was unimpressed by the effort, asking, “Why can’t you automatically type that email?” for you?” In 2014, Google also acquired DeepMind, a leading London-based AI research lab.
Google’s Advanced Technology Review Board, a panel of executives that includes Jeff Dean, the company’s senior vice president of research and artificial intelligence, and Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, met less than two weeks after ChatGPT debuted to discuss his company initiatives, according to the slideshow.
They reviewed plans for products expected to debut at the Google company’s conference in May, including Image Generation Studio, which creates and edits images, and a third version of AI Test Kitchen, an experimental app for testing product prototypes.
Other image and video projects in the works included a feature called Shopping Try-on, a YouTube green screen feature to create backgrounds; a wallpaper creator for the Pixel smartphone; an application called Maya that visualizes shoes in three dimensions; and a tool that could summarize videos by generating a new one, based on the slides.
Google has a list of artificial intelligence programs it plans to offer to software developers and other companies, including imaging technology, which could boost revenue for Google’s Cloud division. There are also tools to help other companies create their own AI prototypes in Internet browsers, called MakerSuite, which will have two “Pro” versions, according to the presentation.
In May, Google also expects to announce a tool to make it easier to create apps for Android smartphones, called Colab + Android Studio, which will generate, complete and repair code, according to the presentation. Another code generation and completion tool, called PaLM-Coder 2, has also been in the works.
Google executives hope to reaffirm their company’s status as an AI pioneer. The company has worked aggressively on AI for the past decade and has already offered a small number of people a chatbot that could rival ChatGPT, called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
